Everything the CIA knows about torture it learned in Northern Ireland
A British soldier in Belfast, Northern Ireland stands outside a new all weather shelter in October 1969. (AP Photo/Peter Kemp)
Patrick Corrigan links the CIA torture units to the British Army in Northern Ireland. The British taught the American all they know about “enhancned interview techniques”.
In August 1971 the UK authorities arrested and interned hundreds of men in Northern Ireland. Fourteen of them were selected for “special treatment” – torture in a specially-built interrogation centre at a British Army camp. The men were subjected to the soon-to-be infamous “five techniques” of hooding, stress positions, white noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and water – combined with brutal beatings & death threats.
Allegations soon emerged of abuse. Amnesty International sent its first ever research mission to the UK to investigate, interviewing the men and finding some of them to still be black and blue with bruises.
In it’s October 30 1971 report, Amnesty found a “prima facie case of brutality and torture”.
…
In 1976, the European Commission on Human Rights found that the UK had tortured the men, but the UK appealed the decision claiming that the techniques used had no long-term impact.
The appeal succeeded and in 1978 the European Court of Human Rights found that the interrogation amounted to “inhuman and degrading treatment” but not torture.
The difference was subsequently seized upon by those who wanted to use similar interrogation techniques.
n 2002, Jay Bybee in the US Attorney General’s office prepared legal advice on what could and could not be done to interrogation subjects. He quoted liberally from the Ireland v UK 1978 decision in the infamous ‘torture memos‘
But before you go, know that British interrogation techniques made it to South America:
British army officers trained Brazilian police in torture methods, perfected in Northern Ireland against people opposing British rule there, a report into human rights abuses during the dictatorship revealed.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was tortured herself by the regime in the 1970s, wept as she presented the 2,000 page Truth Commission documentWednesday, which confirmed that 191 were killed and 243 disappeared.
Not only did Brazilian officials travel to the UK to learn the “English System,” but the study also shows that British officers returned the visit, teaching extreme interrogation at Brazilian police headquarters.
“At the end of 1970 we sent a group of army officers to England to learn the English system of interrogation. This consists of putting the prisoner in a cell incommunicado, a method known as the ‘refrigerator’,” the report quotes former general Hugo de Andrade Abreu.
Psychological torture techniques were adopted that the British mastered in Northern Ireland, designed to destabilize the suspect to the point of admitting to a crime.
“They were variations on the techniques used by the British army against Irish terrorists,” said Amilcar Lobo, an army psychiatrist who worked in a torture center nick-named the ‘house of death’, “they were destined to destructure the personality of the prisoners without touching them.”
Posted: 11th, December 2014 | In: Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
